Re: [bug-gettext] Reproducible builds and .mo file endianness

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Santiago, Daiki,

> I believe you might have heard about the "reproducible builds" effort:
> 
> https://reproducible-builds.org/

Yes. This effort is said to be important for GNU. While some GNU packages
(like emacs or clisp) will have a hard time to achieve this goal, for
GNU gettext it is worth the effort, IMO.

> Would you please reconsider about msgfmt default behaviour?

Yes. And since the industry trend of endianness goes in favour of little-
endian CPUs (even PowerPC and ARM now exist in little-endian flavour),
the default behaviour should be to generate little-endian .mo file.

In 2012, in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=671257,
I wrote "Users of PowerPC systems have the same right to optimized
MO files as users of x86 systems. Therefore I would like to have the
issue solved in Debian's build system." But now the goal is to make
reproducible builds not only possible, but also easy, and this has
higher importance than a few CPU cycles on big-endian PowerPC or ARM.

> This is the patch that the Debian gettext package has for this issue
> since version 0.18.1.1-8 (dated May 2012).
> 
> Is there a possibility that we don't need this patch anymore some day?
> 
> If adopting the patch "as is" is not possible

Yup. The idea of the patch is good, though. Find here a proposed patch
which includes doc changes.

Bruno

0001-Change-msgfmt-to-produce-little-endian-.mo-files-by-.patch
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